The present invention relates generally to a magnetic recording head and more particularly to a magnetic recording head that includes a heating device for thermally-induced protrusion (TIP) of the head and thermally-assisted recording (TAR) on a magnetic recording medium.
In recent years storage densities of hard drives have been increasing at a tremendous pace. One of the challenges to improve the storage densities further involves the reduction of the fly height. In magnetic storage a recording head flies via an air-bearing surface over a spinning disk. Current products have fly heights of less than 10 nm. A further reduction with conventional means is limited, at least partly, by the smoothness of the air bearing and magnetic recording disk surfaces.
A solution to this problem is to exploit the thermally-induced protrusion of a part of the recording head. Another possible improvement in storage densities can be achieved by local heating of the disk, by which the coercivity of the media is temporarily reduced. Consequently, magnetic recording can be realized on harder (i.e., higher coercivity) magnetic materials, which will in turn support higher density magnetization patterns.
Although the advantages of thermally-induced protrusion (U.S. Pat. No. 5,991,113) as well as thermally-assisted recording (U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,233,206 and 6,493,183) have been recognized separately, no conventional device has been able to include both features in a head (e.g., in a single magnetic recording head). Therefore, none of the conventional devices have been able to realize the benefits of both TIP and TAR in a single magnetic recording head.